By turns lurid and lyrical, "Going After Cacciato" combines a surface of realistic war reportage … with a deeper level—perhaps possible only in fiction—of the surrealistic effect war has on the daydreams and nightmares of the combatants. To call "Going After Cacciato" a novel about war is like calling "Moby Dick" a novel about whales….

[As] the epigraph from Siegfried Sassoon says, "Soldiers are dreamers," and ever so gradually Cacciato's dream of peace becomes the dream of his pursuers until the line between cowardly desertion and righteous pursuit blurs. "Cacciato" in Italian means "hunted" or "caught": the novel concerns the way in which the hunters are caught in a vision of life far from the horrors of war.

In the process, the pursuers—and the reader—discover some truths about themselves and the nature of human existence. (p. 1)

But this makes a genuinely serious novel sound serious-minded...